From the book “Stalin” the seminal work of Historian Domenico Losurdo

  • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    I will remind you that the USSR restored its economy to pre-war standards in just 5 years, after losing 27 million people and incalculable cost of destruction, while keeping pensions and social safety nets intact, without relying on foreign aid and investments like the Marshall Plan, and without degrading workers’ rights and wages.

    There is not a single country in the history of humanity that can even remotely approach this level of economic and social achievements. None.

    • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Didn’t the Soviets sort of cannibalize most of the german industry within the Soviet Occupation Area, prior to that area being turned into the DDR? Or was the relocation of eastern german industry a later thing?

      • Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        Eastern German industry was:

        1. Concentrated in Saxony, Thüringen and Berlin, and mostly composed of ore mining.

        2. Not untouched by WW2.

        3. Subject to Capital flight in the earliest years of existence from frightened capitalists relocating to the west

      • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        Not sure I get what you mean. The Soviet industrial capacity already far surpassed the German industry even before the end of the war. This was why the Soviets won, not the Germans. The Germans already ran into severe supplying issues for their military equipment after 1942, the Soviets never really faced this problem as they had a solid industrial base that was already in full swing before the Nazi invasion, and rapidly expanded during the war.

        They did however gain access to some high tech instruments (for example, German-built gyroscopes for V2 rockets which was far ahead of anything the Soviets had at the time), but much of the critical high tech military industries had been destroyed during the retreat to prevent them from falling into the Soviet hands. The entire leadership and high ranking scientists of the V2 rocket project, for example, surrendered to the Americans.

        • CTHlurker [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          See @[email protected] comment above for a more precise description. The Soviets relocated / took some industrial plants partly as reparations and partly in case of allied invasion prior to the development of their own nuclear bomb.

      • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        Yeah, there was both immediate extraction of the industrial capacity of what was largely already a poorer area (both as reparations and because they weren’t sure the allies would stop at the Elbe), and then afterwards the DDR sent a lot of resources to the USSR as well (because the USSR required massive military resources for collective defence that could compete with the west). One of the reasons it didn’t quite keep up with the GDR’s development (the other was that the USA absolutely poured resources into West Germany to make it an anti-communist showpiece.)

        But actually the Soviets ended up putting quite a few factories back after the war. The famine of 1946 affected Germany even harder than the USSR and the occupation government realised that they needed to rebuild the economy for the long haul and that the eastern bloc could take advantage of a relatively highly educated populace

    • ddkman@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yes, this is an awful thing phased as a good one. “The standard of living in russia in 1950 was so incredibly low, that not even an entire world war made all that much of a difference in the standard of livng.”

      • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        Incredibly low compared to whom? The US that had a couple hundred years of head start from exploiting black slaves (where do you think all the wealth in the American South came from) and looting resources from overseas colonies?

        The fact that the USSR was able to close the gap in such a short period of time was exactly the reason of widespread anti-communist propaganda, the meddling of political affairs in post-war Europe including arming fascists through Gladio to destroy the European left, and ironically, financial aid to rebuild Western Europe because they were really afraid of workers uprisings bringing post-war Europe towards the Soviet sphere.

        • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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          The US that had a couple hundred years of head start

          tsarist russia wasn’t a barren patch of dirt, they’d also collected a bunch of capital from imperialism, it was certainly behind the US or germany in the 1890s but not so severely as to constitute ‘hundreds of years’ of development. the bolsheviks actually in large part came from and used a genuine industrial proletariat, in contrast to China which had to have a much higher reliance on the peasantry. let’s not muddle our narratives of communist development here

          • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            The Russian Civil War from 1917-1922 created massive destruction with millions of casualties, together with great famines that were partially caused by petty bourgeoisie destroying their stock. The bourgeoisie would rather burn down the country rather than having the communists have them. That was why Lenin had to introduce NEP because supplies and goods were in such shortage that they could barely get their economy going.

            Stalin said in 1931:

            We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall be crushed.

            Socialist industrialization was what saved the world from Nazism.

            • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              that Stalin quote is a perfect support for what i said, thanks!

              i’m urging against exaggeration, i’m not ignorant of the civil war & challenges of industrialization

        • ddkman@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yeah have you ever lived in the USSR? Have you ever been to a post soviet country? Yeah…

          • Omegamint [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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            The USSR took a backwater state that was still stuck in feudalism (meaning fucking serfdom) and within a single human generation sent the first person into space. They started from a way worse state than the west and made incredible achievements. They did this without the help of first world powers, and were even hindered by constant economic warfare to boot.

            Yeah, you can visit ex Soviet states and see the degradation. Most of their failing infrastructure was built under Soviet planning and has since gone to rot. Economic liberalization has brought nothing to the table, and has obviously failed utterly at whatever promises we’re made initially.

            None of what I’m saying is even debatable. The economic truths of the USSR are easily learned. YOU are a western chauvinist dipshit who looks at the achievements of actual socialism and without a single bit of historical material understanding spouts some ignorant bullshit. I’ll be clear: save your breath to instead talk about whatever authoritarian atrocities were supposedly dealt out. When you talk about the economic failures of the USSR you are treading on ahistorical bullshit that has no real ground.

          • SimulatedLiberalism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            You said the standards of living in the USSR in 1950 was “incredibly low”, have you ever lived in former British and French colonies in Asia?

            Many countries in Asia still haven’t yet achieved independence by 1950, and I can assure you that the standards of living in the USSR was already leaps and bounds beyond most of the world at the time, and comparable to post-war Western Europe and would have easily surpassed them if Western Europe never had the luxury of receiving the vast amount of financial aid from their American masters through the Marshall Plan.

            • ddkman@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Yes because this is how geopolitics work. The USSR basically entirely in Europe. The living standards should be comparable to what europe was like. And not what africa was like. Or Mars.

                • ddkman@lemm.ee
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                  Like honestly, I won’t comment on any of this anymore. But where are you guys from? Because you are either Russian, and sucking the dicks of a failed dictator, or you are from several continents away, with no context to any of this, and then you just are a bunch of useful idiots to a failed dictator. Answer this one honestly. Either to me or to yourselves…

                  • Ossay [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    man got owned so hard he dropped the mask, went straight for homophobia, then dropped the dorkiest line i’ve ever read on lemmy lmao

                  • alcoholicorn [comrade/them, doe/deer]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    I hardly think the guy who beat the nazis and raised standards of living in the USSR from borderline starvation to comparable with western Europe in a couple decades a failure. There were regular famines before Stalin; after Stalin there were none until capitalism reversed all that progress, immiserated the populace, and decreased all measurements of human development by similar numbers to WWII.

                    The CIA admits he wasn’t a dictator, merely representing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

              • Zuzak [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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                The living standards should be comparable to what europe was like. And not what africa was like. Or Mars.

                I don’t think geographic location is as significant as a country’s, you know, history. Just because they were in Europe doesn’t mean that they were starting out on equal footing. If you compare the state of Russia under the tsar to somewhere like Britain or France, then it’s clear that the Soviets were starting from a disadvantage. Moreover, they were under constant economic and military threats from most of the developed world. In spite of all of that, they were able to develop quickly enough to defeat the Nazis and become a global superpower.

              • Fuckass [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                So a backwoods country full of starving and dying peasants cannot be compared to a backwoods colony full of starving and dying peasants in another continent? Lmao. I suppose the only thing you can’t really compare is the military since Russian/soviet soldiers were experienced from imperialist wars during the empire.

          • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Yes I do wish I lived in the USSR at it’s prime. gigachad

            Also it’s a bit rich to use the “muh post soviet poverty shit hole” line when it was the wests neoliberal economic shock doctrine that caused such a tragedy in the first place.

          • AbbysMuscles [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            If you look for it, you can find a video of children offering themselves up as prostitutes in post-Soviet collapse Russia. Please really stop and think about what would force someone to have to do that. When we think of some generic image of an Eastern Bloc, post-Soviet shithole, whatever your mental picture is wasn’t created by that nation. You’re thinking of a post-collapse nation. We have our own in America called the Rust Belt. We don’t blame the existence of ford and general motors as causing the dilapidation of Detroit. Their departure and subsequent economic collapse destroyed that region. It’s a similar story writ large all over the former Second World.

            And sure, Soviet cars sucked. Fortunately most people didn’t need them.

      • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.netOP
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        1 year ago

        Making shit up and hoping no one will notice huh? You really aren’t giving it your best

        The Soviet Union was the fastest industrializing state in the interwar period, come up with better propaganda